Excerpt from “Spirit Transcript #41: Liberty Briscoe, retired madam, death 1882”
Working girls never shed a man’s skin. You can wash his scent from your sheets. Wash inside and out, but the next thing you know, you find a hair in your mouth, or a torn fingernail stuck to your thigh. The dirt and the stink of him caught up in your corners. Your insides weeping steady with the sludge he left inside you. You swallow it. Like you swallowed him. He don’t pay nothing extra for all you had to keep.
You want milled soap, a dress soaked in sun, and a bed no one but you ever laid in. You’d take even one of those for a day. But what you got is a miner’s desperate sweat and horse shit smeared by a careless boot. The seeds men sew grow misery. All of it sunk into your pores. You been covered in someone else so long, you wouldn’t recognize your own scent. Dirty men want a clean woman, but a whore wants nothing, ’cept choice.